Most Americans believe that civility is important in politics and perceive that it has declined, especially if they listen to the radio and/or pay close attention to politics. Half believe that there has been a decline in the tone of politics since Barack Obama was elected [survey by Dan Shea and colleagues: PDF].

But it is not clear that incivility is the root problem. One person’s passion–or righteous indignation–is another’s incivility. It’s easy to find websites in which the author interprets a charge of incivility as an effort to silence the people on his side of the political spectrum. During the civil rights era, respectable opponents of the movement typically accused its leaders of ignoring “the civilities” in order to block their progress.

Even if we can agree that an utterance is uncivil, that is not necessarily an argument against it. Civility can conflict with other values, such as freedom of speech.

Finally, blatant incivility is nothing new in public life. In the election of 1800, John Adams’ “men called Vice President Jefferson ‘a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.’” The incentives in a competitive political campaign have usually favored nastiness–and competition is healthy.

What has changed is the lack of an everyday alternative. I think Americans are responding to a lack of constructive civic engagement in their own communities.

Unions, religious congregations, and neighborhood and membership organizations have all shrunk dramatically since 1970. People are substantially less likely to work on community projects and to attend meetings than they were a generation ago. Newspaper readership has fallen at a similar pace. Jury service plays a shrinking role. School districts have been consolidated to the extent that the proportion of Americans who serve on a school board is down by 95%.

As a result, we cannot react to a nasty fight on the television news by telling ourselves, “That is not how we get along in our community.” Increasingly, we are not involved in the business of our own communities. Because we lack experience making decisions about public matters with fellow citizens who are different from ourselves, we are in no position to judge the quality of arguments among leaders or to choose representatives who are good at dialogue. We cannot distinguish between rudeness and passion, or between obfuscation and complexity.

Civil society is in grave condition, measured not by the proportion of talk that is “civil” (for which no statistics exist) but by the sheer rate of participation in voluntary organizations that involve talk. People are less likely to participate in discussions, and especially discussions that draw diverse citizens and that have meaningful impact on public life.

We are withdrawing from such conversations, by, for example, deliberately enacting policies that disempower juries, school boards, and other local bodies; by choosing to live in politically homogeneous communities; and by leaving multi-purpose, diverse organizations for single-issue lobbies and narrowly-defined professional organizations.

Some of the symptoms of this withdrawal include alienation from public life (with Congress holding a 9% approval rate) and pervasively manipulative communications. Our first instinct now is to develop a “message” to persuade masses of other people to our view—rather than initiate a conversation to decide what would be best. It’s in an environment of dueling “messages” broadcast to passive citizens that incivility feels so toxic.

I am reading a forthcoming book about a whole set of academic programs–centers, certificates, majors, and minors–devoted to service or civic engagement. I am struck that the numerous authors in the volume cite virtually no living intellectuals who are associated with political or social movements.

Some of the authors are overtly hostile to Big Ideas, grand narratives, and large-scale movements. One endorses a “militant or radical particularity, knowing a place in its fullness, with its contradictions, its conflicts, its questions, what it means to be a citizen in that place.” Several write strongly in favor of complexity, enduring relationships, listening, and questioning. The major authors whom they cite most frequently tend to be proponents of pragmatism, of learning from particular and personal experience, and of open-ended conversations: John Dewey, Miles Horton, Paolo Freire, Parker Palmer, C. Wright Mills. The one ideology that is discussed frequently is “neoliberalism”; but it emerges as a shadowy enemy without a specific parallel on the left.

I am sympathetic to these values and also happen to believe that none of the available ideological movements of the present moment is going anywhere. But I would note that the implicit strategy of community-based, open-ended, non-ideological, relational politics is very difficult. It is much easier to participate in politics if you can join a political movement that provides values, diagnoses, prescriptions, strategies, networks, inspirational stories, living leaders, candidates and party slates, regular news reports, organizational supports, cultural expressions (from songs to clothes), and potential career paths. If you have to make everything up by talking with diverse people in your own community, the cognitive and motivational demands are extreme.

When we compare today’s student activists to their forebears, it is important to recognize that their world has dramatically changed because ideological movements have collapsed. Fifty years ago (early in the Kennedy administration):

• Some young activists associated themselves with Marxism, in one of its versions from revolutionary communism to Liberation Theology or European-style social democracy. Today, Marxism lives on college campuses only as scattered reading assignments.
• Other aligned with the liberalism of the New Deal and New Frontier. Liberal values have actually grown more popular among young Americans, but theirs is now basically a defensive or conservative posture, dedicated to protecting or possibly expanding the laws and institutions that were built between 1932 and 1968.
• Still others joined the Civil Rights Movement, then at its apogee and heading toward both triumph and disintegration.
• Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, and some students were gravitating toward the nascent environmental movement, widely seen as in crisis in 2012.
• Just a year later, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, and by then some young people were beginning to create Second Wave Feminism. But in 2008, just 14% of Americans (of all ages) said that they considered themselves feminists. (PDF)
• Finally, a few activist students and faculty endorsed the libertarianism of Barry Goldwater and Milton Friedman. That movement remains vital today, but it draws only a small minority’s support.

Now we ask our young people to go into a community, listen, observe, and figure out for themselves what to do. We are asking a lot.